Chicago A New Hub For Drugs

August 10, 1998|By Douglas Holt, Tribune Staff Writer.

Ciudad Juarez, the sprawling Mexican city just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, is a town too poor to provide its 1.5 million residents with a sewage-treatment plant. But federal authorities consider the drug cartel based there one of the world's most powerful.

Even after its leader, Amado Carrillo-Fuentes, died a year ago in a botched plastic-surgery operation, the Juarez ring has continued generating tens of millions of dollars in drug profits weekly, federal authorities say. The cartel delivers cocaine by the ton to cities such as Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

But a growing hub of the enterprise, recent federal investigations have shown, is Chicago. Juarez cartel drug cases now lead to Chicago more often than any U.S. city, including New York or Los Angeles, according to the U.S. attorney's office in El Paso.

"I think `ubiquitous' is probably a good word to describe the Chicago connection," Assistant U.S. Atty. Sam Ponder said.

Federal officials say Chicago and its suburbs recently have seen a dramatic increase in wholesale drug operations in which cocaine and marijuana are brought here and stored before being divided and shipped elsewhere. One reason for the increase, authorities say, is the Juarez connection.

On Monday, Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to come to Chicago to announce a response. Gore and other federal officials plan to outline the Chicago Narcotics Initiative, which will try to disrupt major drug traffickers, money launderers and street gangs by drawing resources from the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office, according to a draft of the plan obtained by the Tribune.

So far this year, Chicago-based DEA agents have seized more than three times as much cocaine and nearly 10 times as much marijuana as during all of last year. And local customs officials have confiscated $16.1 million in drug-related cash, more than twice last year's total.

While seizures are an imperfect indicator of drug-related activity--they could reflect heightened law-enforcement efforts or just plain luck--authorities see the across-the-board increases as a sign more drugs and drug profits are flowing through Chicago.

But political pressure also has helped prompt the new federal response. Earlier this year, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley complained federal authorities were doing too little to fight drugs locally. Soon afterward, the U.S. attorney's office reassembled a unit of prosecutors devoted to drug cases.

Juarez became a major source of drugs to Chicago starting in the early 1990s, when Colombian drug traffickers began paying Mexican traffickers in cocaine rather than cash. The shift made Mexican traffickers powerful suppliers of cocaine in their own right. As a result, drug runners' command-and-control centers, such as those that have long existed in Miami and New York, began appearing in cities with stronger ties to Mexico--especially Chicago, federal officials said.

"Over the last five years, a new center of gravity for drug trafficking in the United States is really Chicago," said Donald Ferrarone, former special agent in charge of the DEA's Houston office and one of the first law-enforcement officials to notice the Chicago-to-Juarez connection based on intelligence reports coming across his desk.

Drug trafficking in Chicago has long been ruled by the Herrera crime family, with roots in Durango, Mexico. But "the Herreras had a very close relationship with Carrillo-Fuentes and still have it" with his successors running the Juarez cartel, said Peter Lupsha, a retired research scholar at the Latin American Institute at the University of New Mexico.

Beyond family ties, Chicago offers drug traffickers the same infrastructure favored by legitimate businesses: a central location and a ready network of roads, rails and airports.

As a result, it's no surprise that as Carrillo-Fuentes built his drug empire in the 1990s, Chicago became a prime place to warehouse drugs bound for elsewhere and a location to consolidate cash before shipping it back to Mexico, law-enforcement officials said.

The Juarez connection is by no means the only route for Chicago-bound illegal drugs. Nigerian heroin rings have a significant Chicago presence. Some Colombians deal directly with Chicago-based distributors. And in May, DEA agents seized more than 1 1/2 tons of cocaine thought to have come from Reynosa, Mexico. That cocaine was concealed under carrots at a West Side produce company.

But for years, investigators have seen solid hints of a burgeoning Juarez-to-Chicago drug pipeline. In 1995, Chicago police seized 1,615 pounds of cocaine wrapped in newspaper from Juarez. Last month, Chicago police confiscated 4,900 pounds of marijuana at a South Side warehouse from a semi-truck that rolled in from El Paso.